The Life of Elves (25 page)

“You were the head of your council before Maria's father?”

“Yes. But another candidate ran against Maria's father, and almost won.”

“Aelius.”

“Aelius, whose anger you can see today in the sky over Burgundy. Now, as I was leaving the library, I had an interesting conversation with the sweeper, who seemed to be behaving very oddly.”

“There are sweepers among the elves?” asked Clara.

“There are gardens all around our libraries,” said Petrus, “and we sweep the paths every day at dawn and at twilight during the seasons when there are leaves on the trees. We have pretty brooms, and the moss mustn't be damaged. It is a noble task, although I have never found it very interesting, but as I already told you, for many years I was a rather uninspired elf. And besides, I always liked to read. I think I have spent my life reading. Even when I drink, I am reading.”

“So the sweeper wasn't sweeping, he was reading under a tree,” said the Maestro. “And he was so absorbed in his reading that he didn't hear me approach. So I asked him what he was reading.”

“And I replied: a prophecy,” said Petrus. “A prophecy? asked the Council Head. A prophecy, I said. In the body of our poetic texts, there is one that is different from the others. It belongs to a collection of poems and songs, most of them elegiac, entitled
Canto of the Alliance,
and it celebrates the natural alliances: mists in the evening, clouds of ink, stones, and all the rest.”

He sighed, vaguely chagrined.

“But that text was different. It did not celebrate any known event, nor did it evoke anything in my memory, but it described our trouble as if it had anticipated it, and it proposed the remedy as if it had dreamt it. No one had ever paid it any attention. But when I read it, I believed that the world was being torn in half, and that a door was opening in my heart. Only three verses telling an unknown story—but after centuries spent drinking tea and listening to sublime poems, it was life as a whole that was exploding and sparkling, like after a glass of moscato.”

His eyes shone with the emotion he had felt at the time.

“I read the text and I understood what the sweeper meant to say,” said the Maestro. “Then I had to convince others, and Petrus showed a great deal of talent for this. Since that day, the prophecy has been our guide in war.”

When he recited the poem, the ancestor trembled and Clara thought she could see a silvery glow flash through the soft fur.

 

the rebirth of the mists

through two children of November and snow

the rootless the last alliance

 

“It is the only text of fiction ever written by our kind,” said the Maestro. “For that reason, we think it is prophetic. That it depicts a reality that is still to come, but that might save us. For the first time in our history, our mists are declining. Some think that men are responsible for this decline, and that their negligence has weakened nature; others, on the contrary, think that the trouble stems from the fact that we are not sufficiently united. If I consider the paintings inspired by our alliance, this Christ painted by an elf—and who has for all that never seemed more human—and Alessandro's last canvas, which exalts the bridge of our world without showing it, then I know that the art of humankind has given us stories we could not have conceived of, and in return our mists transport them beyond their lands. It is time to invent our destiny and to believe in this last alliance; there are too many footbridges showing the desire we have to cross the same bridge together.”

“Are we the two children of November and snow?” she asked.

“Yes,” said the Maestro.

“There are other children born in the November snow.”

“There are no other children born elfin and human in the November snow. But for all that, we do not know what to do with this miracle.”

Clara thought of the men haunted by bridges and by mountains that could save them from being born far from their hearts, of those elfin painters, sweepers, and musicians, who were fascinated by the creative genius of humans; she thought of those footbridges crossing between two worlds through a vastness crisscrossed with art's glowing lights. And above those lights shone a more intense clarity, supplanting music and forms and inspiring them with its superior strength.

“The universe is a gigantic story,” said Petrus. “And everyone has their own story, radiating somewhere in the firmament of fictions and leading somewhere into the sky of prophecies and dreams. In my case, amarone shows it to me. After two or three glasses, I always have the same vision. I see a house in the middle of the fields, and an old man on his way home after work. Do that man and that house exist? I don't know. The old fellow puts his hat on a large dresser and smiles at his grandson, who is in the kitchen, reading. I can sense that he wants the boy's life and work to be less exhausting than his own have been. And so he is glad that the boy likes to read and to daydream and he says,
Non c'è uomo che non sogni.
*
Why do I always return to that same story? Every time, when the granddad talks to his grandson, I weep. And then I dream.”

“Your powers are connected to the power of fiction,” said the Maestro, “and alas, we do not understand it very well.”

“There are only two moments when everything is possible in this life,” said Petrus, “when one drinks, and when one makes up stories.”

Clara felt an ancient consciousness quiver inside her, a consciousness that resembled the connection between women that existed beyond space and time and that she had experienced with Rose. This time, however, it connected beings to the creations of the mind. A vast constellation appeared before her mind's eye. She was able to map out souls and works of art on a brilliant globe, whose projections of light went from one end of the cosmos to the other, in such a way that a canvas painted in Rome in this century led the way to hearts and minds in a distant era and a faraway place. The combined frequency of earth and art became one, uniting distant entities that were similarly attuned. This frequency was no longer limited to her perception, but crossed different levels of reality, and spread like a network that lit up as the distances dissolved. It was powerfully natural and powerfully human. Similarly, it recorded a succession of images that lasted no longer than a few seconds, but where Petrus's empathy conveyed a story as lyrical and complex as those he had already told her, because they were both connected to this infinity of bonds in the ether, and they could see the footbridges over the void where others saw only solitude and absence.

Then she saw a little boy sitting in his country kitchen, in the evening shadows. An old man with a face furrowed by labor is placing his peasant's cap on one side of the dresser, and wiping his brow in a gesture of repose. The church tower is striking the seven o'clock angelus; the day's labors are over; the old granddad smiles and his smile lights up the entire land and then, beyond his mountains and his plains, lights up unknown regions and even farther still, exploding in a spray of sparks, illuminating a country so vast that no man could cross it on foot.

“Non c'è uomo che non sogni,”
she murmured.

“No one has ever penetrated my vision in this way,” said Petrus. “I can feel your presence at the heart of my dreams.” Then gently, visibly moved: “You and Maria are the totality of two worlds, that of nature, and of art. But you are the one who holds the possibility of a new story in her hands. And if so many men have been able to live for two millennia in a reality shaped by belief in the resurrection of a crucified man wearing a crown of thorns, it is not absurd to think that anything is possible in such a world. It is up to you now. You see souls, and you can give them their stories and their dreams, which build footbridges that both humans and elves aim to cross.”

“You have to help me,” she said.

“I am just a simple sweeper and a soldier,” he replied, “and you are a prophetic star. I don't believe you need me.”

“You were a soldier?”

“I was a soldier and I fought in my native country.”

“The elves have armies?”

“The elves have wars, and they are as ugly as human wars. One day I will tell you the story of my first battle. I was drunker than a skunk. But you can do a great deal of damage if you fall over.”

“Have you ever killed someone?”

“Yes.”

“What does it feel like to kill someone?”

“You feel fear,” he said. “Are you afraid?”

“Yes.”

“That's good. I am with you and I won't leave you, either in war or in peace. You haven't had a family, but you have a friend.”

She thought:
I have a friend.

“But now it's the first battle,” he said. “There's no going back.”

“The snow,” she said. “That is Maria's dream. The earth, the sky, and the snow.”

 

She got up and went over to the piano where she had often played pieces whose stories she could not hear. But Petrus's dream had forged the key to her hours of work with the Maestro. Inside every score was the story from which the composer's heart was spun, and all those stories, right from the start, scrolled through her memory, taking on the color of those dreams which, splendid or dull, were written in the great constellation of stories. So she played again the hymn of the alliance, which she had composed in a desire for union and forgiveness, but she added a new spirit and words that came to her from Maria's heart.

 

 

 

*
There are no men who do not dream.

W
e are withdrawing our protection. They will have to rely on themselves from now on. Soon we will find out.”

“We have been getting messages in passing. Those who are in charge of the command must stand ready.”

“Must we gather by the bridge?”

“It hardly matters where we gather.”

I
n one fell swoop, the land's defenses collapsed. For Maria it was like a great undertow in the ocean, exposing a shoreline swept with sadness and desolation. She knew that the lowlands had flourished for years because of the power of the fantastical boars and the mercurial horses, but this power was so inseparable from her own, and she was so accustomed to it being her source of song and of nature's energy, that its sudden disappearance left her as blind and deaf as if she had never heard its operas or gazed at its etchings—and she knew that this was the fate of ordinary humans.

 

From the clearing in the east wood to the steps outside the church, there was a tide of despair, and everyone felt as if they were standing abandoned on the edge of an abyss. Father François and Gégène stood rooted to the spot; the little girl's helplessness had destroyed the very thing that had sustained them in their struggle against the storm. The priest in particular could no longer find the corolla that had spread through him, no matter how hard he looked; horrified by the degree of his blasphemy, he resolved to confess to the bishop as soon as he could, once the cataclysm was behind them. I have sinned, he kept thinking, as he shivered with cold and looked all around at a landscape that seemed as wretched as his fervor of a lapsed preacher.

But the good father was not the only one whose enlightened moments as a free man had vanished, for Gégène was now filled with the same old insidious jealousy he had once felt about Lorette's past love, and it was the same thing from one end of the land to the other: disgust and bitterness were taking hold, and every soul raged against the baseness of destiny. The men following Gégène no longer knew their own names; there were those at the church who were degenerating into swaggering braggarts, although a warning shot would scatter them like crows; and at the clearing, it took all André's remaining strength to rescue what was left of the courage of the three others. It was as if scars were re-opening and old wounds they'd presumed were healed forever were becoming re-infected; they felt spite toward that baneful child who was plunging their world into such deadly chaos; people suddenly realized they owed no other fealty than to the duty taught by the priest and the bishop of Dijon; and they believed that their duty did not include saving a stranger with powers that were bound to be sacrilegious. When all was said and done, old resentments were adding salt to their wounds, old resentments which the combined powers of Maria and her protectors had defused for a time—remorse and the legacy of guilt, meanness and fear, the litany of concupiscence and cowardly denial, and an entire string of petty acts that left them trapped within a cellar acrid with terror.

Then in Rome, Clara played and the tide turned. Maria's sadness and desolation ebbed away and made room for a rush of memories: through the transparency of Eugénie's face came the mercurial horse, the fantastical boar, the mists that told of her arrival in the village and that sky of snow into which everyone's dreams had slipped while life opened up and you could look inside. Music and the vibrations of nature became intelligible once again. The first time, the same piece that Clara was playing had eased her heart, burdened with anguish by Eugénie's death. And now it told her a story that honed her powers.

 

in te sono tutti i sogni e tu cammini su un cielo

di neve sotto la terra gelata di febbraio

 

There was a sudden gust of wind in the clearing. The landscape was apocalyptic. The sky became a menacing, deathly lid, shot through with the light and rumblings of the storm. All that was left of the world was a feeling of immense danger.